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School board to select overcrowding solution

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Hazleton Area elementary and middle school classrooms are still overcrowded.

But school officials have come up with three suggestions for redistributing students in effort to ease classroom congestion.

The board of education is expected to pick one of the three options today.

After years of searching for an affordable way to create more space for the burgeoning student population, the district is still using modular classrooms on three campuses and many teachers instruct pupils in classrooms packed with more than the maximum recommended number of students.

When the district purchased the former Bishop Hafey High School at Maple Manor for $5.5 million in 2012, it was heralded as an economical, brick-and-mortar solution to overcrowding in some of the district's most congested elementary-middle schools.

In January, district Superintendent Francis X. Antonelli suggested a reconfiguration that would have moved all seventh-grade students into the Maple Manor building and all eighth grade into the current Ninth Grade Center, located adjacent to the high school campus. Ninth-grade students would have assimilated into one of three high school options - the main high school, the Career Center or the Academy of Sciences.

But a majority of parents who voiced an opinion said they oppose that proposal. The school board, in turn, voted it down and sent the administration back to the drawing board.

When the school board meets at 6:15 p.m. today, Antonelli and George Donadi, the district's acting director of elementary and middle education, will present three new class configuration proposals for the board's consideration.

The options are color-coded: blue, green and yellow.

The yellow plan would turn the current Ninth Grade Center into an early childhood education facility for students in kindergarten through fourth grade. The district's PreK Counts and Early Intervention programs would be housed in the same building. The Maple Manor school would be for students in fifth through eighth grade. Ninth-grade students would assimilate into their choice of the district's three high school options.

The green option would put PreK Counts and Early Intervention into the current Ninth Grade Center along with kindergarten, first and second grade. The Maple Manor school would be for students in third through eighth grade. Ninth-grade students would assimilate into the high school facilities.

The blue plan would keep ninth grade students at the current Ninth Grade Center and put kindergarten to eighth grade in the Maple Manor school.

Antonelli said administration is still working on which schools the students would be drawn from to populate the new configuration.

"There's a quadrant where the bulk of the student population lives. The goal is to start at the center of that quadrant and work outward," Antonelli said.

Modular classrooms are still in use at Hazleton Elementary/Middle School, Heights-Terrace Elementary/Middle School and West Hazleton Elementary/Middle School. Reconfiguration would likely include those three schools as well as the Arthur Street School and Arthur Street Annex.

"The goal is for classrooms to have a maximum of 22 students from kindergarten to second grade, and a maximum of 25 students in grades three to eighth," Antonelli said.

Donadi said reducing class size is one of three goals in the reconfiguration proposals. The other two are elimination of all modular classrooms and an overall improvement to the educational atmosphere in the schools.

"We're trying to strike a balance while striving for those three goals," Donadi explained.

"They're workable," Donadi said of the three proposals. "Some work a little better than others at striking that balance. But the decision is up to the board," he said.

Antonelli said, "It's up to the board now to choose one of those three options."

mlight@standardspeaker.com

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